Jason Lee's nostalgic Montreal Chinatown tour

When Jason Lee wanders around Chinatown, the past and the present come together in a tangle of tastes and smells and memories.

It’s his parents, his sisters and their kids squeezing into a table at Kim Fung and racing to order dumplings and chicken feet for Sunday dim sum. And those Saturday afternoons of his childhood when he would finish Chinese classes at the church near Wing’s Factory and head over to the family’s grocery store to wait for his Dad, sneaking firecrackers.

In Lee’s Chinatown, tiles clatter as old men play mah-jong in the social clubs above the stores. Hush-hush stories are told of ghosts and the monks called in to exorcise them from the Clark St. tenements where they linger. And the drugstore smells of herbal syrups, teas and pills and camphor balms for curing aching tummies and sore throats.

Lee says he can still taste the smoky sweetness of the egg tarts at Ho Ho’s on the corner of de la Gauchetière and Clark Sts., though the popular old spot is long gone. Everything and everyone in that old Chinese diner with the spinning stools smelled of smoke when the neighbourhood chefs came in on their coffee breaks to have a cigarette and a butter roll.

As the intrepid eater behind the popular local food blog Shut Up and Eat, Lee reviews restaurants all over town. But he always returns to Chinatown when a craving strikes for something tasty and inexpensive.

Even now, at age 33, after a lifetime of wandering its streets and slurping its noodles, Lee still comes back to Chinatown every couple of weeks for breakfast at Ethan’s or noodles at Sai Gwan. The neighbourhood is just a sliver of the thriving district it was in the 1940s when his grandfather opened the grocery store on de la Gauchetière St. W., where the restaurant Beijing now stands. It has been squeezed by big developments like the Palais des congrès and Complexe Guy Favreau and worn down by decades of municipal government neglect. Much of the Chinese community lives elsewhere now, in Brossard and the St-Laurent borough, where Lee himself lives, or in the new Chinatown that is burgeoning downtown near Concordia University. The only Chinese people who still live here are the elderly residents of nearby seniors’ residences and rooming houses.

Still, Lee says, Chinatown persists. It’s got its kitschy side, with souvenir stalls and all-you-can eat buffets. But Lee says the more authentic Chinatown survives as a knot of bakeries, diners, restaurants, drug stores and grocers, many of which have been opened by new generations of immigrants from China, Hong Kong and Vietnam.

“When you walk down the street you hear Cantonese and Mandarin, but also Vietnamese and French and English,” he says.

It’s not New York or San Francisco or even Toronto, with their sprawling Chinatowns, but Montreal’s compact Quartier chinois is still a living, working neighbourhood. And as if to prove the point, we bump into Lee’s mom and his aunt at the corner of Clark St. They are carrying grocery bags as they accompany a relative who speaks neither French or English to her doctor’s appointment.

“I have a real emotional attachment to Chinatown and I am always thankful when a new Asian business opens when an old one closes down. I just wish more people understood how important it is to Montreal,” he says as we sit for a Hong Kong-style breakfast at Ethan Restaurant. Lee has ordered his favourites: deep-fried French toast with honey for dipping, and noodles and Chinese doughnuts.

Lee says Chinatown is like an onion, a place with many layers and textures, the best stuff hidden behind the faded facades and shops selling faux-silk kimonos and bamboo back-scratchers.

“When the waiter opens the dual swinging doors to the kitchen, if you look at the right moment, you can catch a glimpse of fiery woks masterfully manipulated by deft hands, and random men in white short sleeve shirts and paper hats counting lotto tickets and calculating sports odds, he writes in a blog post about the “secret Chinese menu” at Beijing Restaurant, one of his favourite Chinatown spots.

Jason Lee’s favourite Chinatown stops

Ethan is a Hong Kong-style diner (named after the owners’ son) that looks like it’s always been here, with its worn-out green-vinyl chairs and the old guy at the barbecue counter, illuminated by the red glow of infrared lights over the barbecued pork and duck. In fact, it arrived on the scene just a few years ago, taking over the space left vacant when the popular barbecue shop and grocer Sun Ling closed.

Ethan is crowded from noon right through into the evening, with visiting Hong Kong businessmen in fancy suits having a quick lunch, customers waiting for their Styrofoam takeout containers to be filled and elderly couples in for a steaming bowl of won ton soup.

The specialty at this cha chanting (which means tea room) is Hong Kong style breakfast, with congee and French toast on the menu. There’s also an extensive menu of tea, including hot lemon tea and honey, Hong Kong milk tea and even Horlicks and Ovaltine, a nod to Hong Kong’s British side.

Lee often comes for breakfast and orders congee or French toast, Hong Kong-style. Sometimes it’s filled with sweetened condensed milk and sometimes ham, or even peanut butter.

He likes the roast pork here, too. It’s skin is crispy and crunchy, the sign, Lee says, of a barbecue master.

This old-school Cantonese restaurant has been run by the same family for decades. It’s open late, late, late to accommodate downtown shift workers and the staff from neighbouring Chinese restaurants who slide in when their own workday is done.

Lee loves almost everything at Beijing, including the vegetables sautéed in garlic and the hot pot, which comes to the table in dramatic fashion — a clay pot filled with still-sizzling chicken, gizzards and wings. “Jeh jeh gai bo,” it is called, after the sputtering sound it makes.

Lee also gets kick out of ordering off-menu. “You have to be in-the-know and ask the waiter what’s special that day. It might be razor clams or black-bean snails,” he says. “But it’s always delicious.”

By Chinatown standards, this grocery store is humungous, though you’d never guess from its storefront. D & G is located down a set of escalators below the ground-floor Lanzhou noodle shop in the Swatow Plaza. It’s clean, brightly lit and well-organized, with the neighbourhood’s widest selection of Asian foods.

The grocery store has rows and rows of Asian snack foods (spicy shrimp chips anyone?) and a large and enticing fruit and vegetable section and fish and meat counters that make shopping at your neighbourhood grocery store seem positively boring. Pick live eels or tilapia from the tanks and have them gutted and scaled on the spot, or pick through the ice-filled plastic bins for the freshest sea urchins or blue crabs.

The telltale sign that something delicious is going on inside is the pair of glowing red lanterns hanging outside and the picture-posters of soup bowls and noodle dishes taped to the window.

“The chairs are mismatched and the place looks a little rough around the edges,” Lee says. “But the chef really knows how to make noodles and authentic small dishes from Hong Kong.”

One of his favourites is the won ton lo mein (which translates as mixed noodle). It’s a heaping plate of dense and chewy egg noodles topped with fat shrimp and pork-stuffed wontons and, if you are in the mood and it’s on the menu, a slice of braised brisket. It comes with a bowl of broth on the side. “You can spoon it over each bite, or sip it on its own,” Lee suggests.

Or try the curry fish balls, which are stewed in a yellow curry sauce with onion and garlic.

The Lee family (no relation to Jason) has been making Chinese noodles here in this factory across the street from Complexe Guy Favreau since 1946. They added fortune cookies, an entirely North American creation, to their repertoire in the 1960s and made a name for themselves as the first to tuck bilingual French and English messages inside the crispy cookies. How they make the fortune cookies is a big secret and no one is allowed in the back. But Lee comes here to buy fresh ramen and rice noodles and yellow egg noodles from the counter near the entrance. And fortune cookies, too. He also scoops up fortune cookie rejects by the bagful at reduced prices. “I don’t really care about the fortunes,” he says, “It’s the cookie I am after.”

This is where the Lee family gathers for dim sum on weekends. It used to be Kam Fung, but changed owners recently and the restaurant got a minor name change.

The decor is nondescript, but Lee likes the endless variety of dim sum dishes which come rolling around on trolleys. He has a soft spot for the siu mai pork dumplings and the fried doughnuts wrapped in rice noodle served with sesame and sweet soy sauce.

Harmonie can be a little dizzying, with its wall-to-wall displays of sweet and savoury buns, cakes and cookies. Everything is so fresh and tasty it’s impossible to resist going home with a box full. It’s the oldest of several Hong Kong style bakeries installed on this stretch of de la Gauchetière St., near St-Urbain. Sweet tooths grab a set of tongs and a tray and head for the egg tarts, fancy cakes and fluffy sweet buns stuffed with cream, sweetened bean paste or custard. Savoury types go straight to the warming ovens to pick out salty, spicy buns stuffed with curry beef, barbecue chicken, hotdogs. Lee’s personal favourites are the fat, perfectly rectangular $2 slices of green tea sponge cake and the pork buns.

The nutty and delicious melt-in-your mouth candy spun by Johnny Chin and his family in this teeny tiny shop comes with plenty of history. Legend has it that the candy was created thousands of years ago during the Han dynasty by a chef who wanted to impress the emperor at a state banquet. Chin learned the art of dragon’s beard from his brother in Hong Kong.

It’s made from frozen corn syrup dunked in rice flour and then stretched and twisted over and over until its an angel-hair tangle of spun sweetness sprinkled with coconut and crushed peanuts. Half the fun is jamming into the shop, elbow to elbow, to watch it being made.

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